Denise DeCaires Narain

Contemporary Caribbean women's poetry: making style

This book comprises the first sustained account of Caribbean women?s poetry and provides detailed readings of poems by women poets whose work to date has received comparatively little critical attention. These readings are contextualized both within Caribbean cultural debates and postcolonial and feminist critical discourses. The book explores the gendered implications of nationalist cultural debates and assesses the distinction between `the oral? and `the scribal? which these debates were focused around and considers the critical issues raised by the performance of raced and gendered identities in poetic discourse. It concludes with a discussion and critique of the category, `Caribbean women?s writing?.

What happened to global sisterhood? Writing and reading 'the' postcolonial woman

While debates continue about how third wave feminism might be defined, it is generally agreed that this ‘wave’ embraces the diversity of women; and that it refuses the homogenising definition of woman-as-victim, as well as the universal ‘solutions,’ associated with second wave feminism. This clearly implies a generational approach to feminist history. But just as the spurious distinction between ‘activist’ and ‘theoretical’ feminisms, summarised as ‘Anglo-American versus French’ in discussions in the late 1980s and 1990s, ignored the majority of the world’s women, so, third wave feminism risks repeating the complacent assumption that the West is the world. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake have highlighted ‘the profound influence of U.S. Thrid World feminism on the third wave’ (9), pointing up the ways in which the essays in their collection, Third Wave Agenda, have found in the work of writers such as bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde (to name only a few) ‘languages and images that account for multiplicity and difference, that negotiate contradiction in affirmative ways, and that give voice to a politics of hybridity and coalition’ (9). Although Heywood and Drake do warn of the dangers of appropriation and borrowing by white US (third wave) feminists, I remain concerned about the place of ‘Third World’ women’s texts in the genealogy of the waves. Alka Kurian puts the issues succinctly: While feminists would surely not deny that the oppression of women is a matter of international concern, the west has tended to dominate both the theoretical and practical aspects of the movement. The customary division of the history of feminism into “waves” stands as a good example of this, since these categorisations are conventionally organised around American and European events and personalities. Thus, however unintentionally, the “grand narrative” of feminism becomes the story of western endeavour, and relegates the experience of non-western women to the margins of feminist discourse. (66)

Writing 'home': mediating between 'the local' and 'the literary' in a selection of postcolonial women's texts

This paper will focus on a selection of texts by postcolonial women writers, including Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Adhaf Soueif and Assia Djebar to explore the ways that the worlds of ‘the oral’ and ‘the scribal’ intersect and/or collide in their fictions. Many Caribbean writers and/or critics have argued for orality as the privileged signifier of the local and the paper will begin by exploring the ways that this is both endorsed and challenged in the fiction of Rhys and Kincaid. The argument will then be extended in a discussion of writers from other postcolonial locations, focusing on the way that the figure of ‘the servant’ is often mobilised to mediate between ‘the local’ and ‘the literary’. The paper will argue that the very diverse ways in which these writers negotiate the cultural spheres of ‘the local’ and ‘the literary’ offers useful insights into the possibilities and limitations of ‘regional’ and ‘postcolonial’ categorisations.This paper will focus on a selection of texts by postcolonial women writers, including Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Adhaf Soueif and Assia Djebar to explore the ways that the worlds of ‘the oral’ and ‘the scribal’ intersect and/or collide in their fictions. Many Caribbean writers and/or critics have argued for orality as the privileged signifier of the local and the paper will begin by exploring the ways that this is both endorsed and challenged in the fiction of Rhys and Kincaid. The argument will then be extended in a discussion of writers from other postcolonial locations, focusing on the way that the figure of ‘the servant’ is often mobilised to mediate between ‘the local’ and ‘the literary’. The paper will argue that the very diverse ways in which these writers negotiate the cultural spheres of ‘the local’ and ‘the literary’ offers useful insights into the possibilities and limitations of ‘regional’ and ‘postcolonial’ categorisations.

Mapping a return to feminist solidarity (or 'diving into the wreck' again)

M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 410 pp. ISBN 0–8223–3645–6, £18.99 (pbk) Ketu Katrak, Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2006. 291 pp. ISBN 0–8135–3715–0, £24.95 (pbk) Helen Scott, Caribbean Women Writers and Globalization: Fictions of Independence. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. 193 pp. ISBN 978–0–7546–5134–5, £55.00 (hbk) Anastasia Valassopoulos, Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. 176 pp. ISBN 978–0–415–35342–7, £60.00 (hbk)

Close Encounters: Solidarity, Servitude and Postcolonial Feminist Affects and Affiliations

Abstract This essay offers close readings of three texts that in different ways foreground the problems, possibilities and struggle involved in forging affective connections across difference between women: Kate Clanchy, What is She Doing Here? 2008, Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, 1991a and Marlene Van Niekerk, ‘Labour’, 2004. The author argues that the incomplete and partial nature of affective moments represented in these texts signals possibilities for a cautiously redefined idea of affective feminist solidarity as it is mobilized in the intimacy of domestic spaces.This essay offers close readings of three texts that in different ways foreground the problems, possibilities and struggle involved in forging affective connections across difference between women. I argue that the incomplete and partial nature of affective moments represented in these texts signal possibilities for a cautiously re-defined idea of affective feminist solidarity as it is mobilized in the intimacy of domestic spaces.

Writing Now Review Essay

David Foster Wallace’s essay, ‘Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky’ (in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, Abacus, 2005), is notable for its praise of both the achievements of Dostoevsky-critic Joseph Frank and those of Frank’s object, Dostoevsky himself. Where Frank is primarily exalted for his dedication, including the heroic ‘library time’ put into penning four thick volumes on the Russian writer’s life (257), Foster Wallace holds Dostoevsky up higher, far above his biographer, as a model literary figure. The author is admirable, in Foster Wallace’s eyes, for the compelling nature of his stories, his mastery of characterisation, and his weighty subject matter. Dostoevsky wrote ‘about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide’ (265). Thus the novelist’s greatest strength for Foster Wallace is his commitment * not his commitment to this or that political stance or to the simple act of writing itself, but his commitment to understanding the demands of being; his commitment to his characters and through them an assessment of life; his commitment to exploring, directly and unflinchingly, questions ‘about the stuff that’s really important’ (265). These days, the essay concludes: